From: "milton_aupperle" <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: April 3, 2012 1:20:08 AM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Mars APril 2 2012 (sort of)

Hi Folks;

I shot this tonight - first imaging session in 7 weeks. I originally planned to measure the 4 hour rotation of Asteroid "Pariana", but thin clouds and turbulence kept causing the Mag 9.1 guide star to disappear. So on to plan "B".

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Astro_IIDC/files/Planetary/Mars_3x_RGB_20120402.jpg

Seeing was bad (+/- 6 arc seconds), so Mars's disk was jumping half it's diameter per frame. Grasshopper camera 16 bit, 30 fps, 7 ms exposures R G B Astrodon filters, 1600 mm focal length on the RC 8" Scope. Since Mars is about 14 arc seconds, that works out to be 17 pixels on the CCD and I triple scale stacked it.

Despite all the issues (bad seeing, short focal length, small scope etc.), you can just barely make out the North polar cap, two dark areas (Mare Acidalium to the north - ) separated by a brighter area (Chryse) and on the right hand limb the bluish cloudy areas above the Tharsis volcanoes.

To see the original image size, scale the image down to 33% in Apples Preview app and that's what the raw images looked like.

TTYL..

Milton Aupperle